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With another month of the pandemic in the books, here is a look back at the exciting Linux and open-source highlights that came about during the course of November. This month was particularly exciting for new Linux kernel developments, never-ending work on open-source graphics drivers, the much anticipated launch of Intel 12th Gen "Alder Lake", gamers continuing to clamor for the Steam Deck, and much more...

Earlier this year OpenPrinting took over development of the CUPS print server with Apple no longer interested in handling the future development of this open-source Linux/macOS/Unix/Solaris print server. Out this week is CUPS 2.4 as the first major release under the guidance of OpenPrinting...

Early patches providing for IO_uring zero-copy send support for the Linux kernel's networking subsystem is looking extremely promising for greater throughput...

Amazon Web Services today shared that C7g instances are coming powered by Graviton3, their next-gen in-house AArch64 processors...

Following all the work carried out by Mike Blumenkrantz (Valve) and others, the Mesa Zink code is ending the year in terrific and very capable shape for OpenGL running atop the Vulkan API. Here is a look at where things currently stand with mainline Mesa for Zink OpenGL-on-Vulkan compared to the native RadeonSI Gallium3D OpenGL driver.

With the graphics driver support for Alder Lake S-series in good shape with Linux 5.16 and the Alder Lake P-series support also coming together for upcoming ADL-based laptops, next up is the Alder Lake N enablement happening for Linux...

Sent out today was the fifth revision to AMD's new "amd-pstate" kernel driver focused on providing enhanced CPU frequency controls for Linux systems...

Last month we reported on progress for porting the Mesa Radeon Vulkan driver to Haiku, the BeOS-inspired open-source operating system. Now in ending out November they not only have RADV running but also working with Gallium3D's Zink for offering OpenGL acceleration over Vulkan...

KDE developer Nate Graham is known for his weekly (excellent) development summaries and driving many usability improvements and other refinements to the KDE desktop in recent years. Nate has written a new opinion piece arguing for more simplicity by default to broaden the desktop's appeal to more novice computer users with limited skills...

While there was the Libre RISC-V GPU effort aiming to provide an open-source GPU accelerator based on RISC-V, it ultimately turned into Libre-SOC with a focus now on the POWER ISA. Meanwhile Vortex is continuing to mature as an open-source, FPGA-based RISC-V GPGPU processor...

Valve has provided an updated developer-focused "frequently asked questions" area stemming from community questions during the recent Steam Deck developer event...

With a few weeks having passed since the Fedora 35 debut, more feature work and planning around next spring's Fedora 36 are underway...

As part of David Howells of Red Hat long-term work on improving the caching code used by network file-systems, he today posted a big patch series rewriting the fscache and cachefiles code as the latest significant step on that adventure...

CodeWeavers is kicking off the new week by releasing CrossOver 21.1 for Linux, macOS, and Chrome OS users wanting to enjoy Windows games and applications...

The Linux Vendor Firmware Service (LVFS) and FWUPD on their great upward trajectory has in recent times been expanding beyond their initial focus of desktop/laptop hardware to supporting more server platforms for firmware updating. The latest feature driven by their growing server interests is "best known configuration" handling for where there are multiple independently-versioned firmware packages for a given system and may be support recommendations or potential version conflicts between the the different firmware packages...

Last week Amazon Web Services released Amazon Linux 2022 in preview form and since then I've been trying out their new cloud-optimized Linux distribution. It's been working out well on AWS (to no surprise) but also great was the level of performance provided by this now-Fedora-based distribution.

Linus Torvalds just released Linux 5.16-rc3 with plenty of fixes included. With it being US Thanksgiving week, he's also having fun with this kernel by having adjusted the codename to "Gobble Gobble" in reference to turkeys...

PHP 8.1 released on Thursday as the latest major feature release for this programming language. In this article are some benchmarks of PHP 8.1.0 on an AMD EPYC powered Linux server compared to prior releases going as far back as PHP 5.6.

Net-next has been queuing a number of enticing performance optimizations ahead of the Linux 5.17 merge window kicking off around the start of the new year. Covered already was a big TCP optimization and a big improvement for csum_partial() that is used in the network code for checksum computation. The latest optimization is improving the AF_UNIX code path for those using AF_UNIX sockets for local inter-process communication...

Back during the Linux 5.15 cycle Intel contributed an improvement for tiered memory systems where less used memory pages could be demoted to slower tiers of memory storage. But once demoted that kernel infrastructure didn't have a means of promoting those demoted pages back to the faster memory tiers should they become hot again, though now Facebook/Meta engineers have been working on such functionality...